Robert E. Wright

@CreacyHarold @amjuster @RBrookhiser Prolly that Hugo Black wasn't qualified when added and never grew into the position.

@amjuster @RBrookhiser What is your point.

Who were they?

@DividendBreeder They will fold if there are not enough people like you. Assuming you actually bought something and didn't use it like a library.

I could roam around a Barnes and Noble for hours. So many books. Every topic and genre imaginable. Brick and mortar stores should never go away.

@damianplayer What is to prevent the creation of neurodivergent LLMs? Robots that can work in the construction trades?

Palantir CEO, Alex Karp says only 2 types of people will survive the AI era..

@ick_real Yes.

When people get in their 50s and 60s and up, do you start thinking about how many years you have left? I’m curious

The country's infrastructure ... hollowed out. Grammar is in short supply, too.

There is not one major city in the United States that is better off now than it was 15 years ago. The decline is a reality. The countries infrastructure is outdated, the population looks unhealthy and defeated. Is this war going to change the fact that America is being hallowed out?

@1iam_mark_G Too cheap. The higher the cost, the more that can be safely skimmed. (pun unintended)

Scientists create Liquid Trees; a tank full of water and micro-algae that could be an alternative to trees in urban areas.

“In engineering, you are peer reviewed by reality”. From Rory Sutherland, in this week’s Spectator.

@CooperationWins @scottsantens Actually, the US implemented a UBA in response to 19th century mechanization. The A was land that anyone could claim, iff they worked it. Today, it could be cash. O/c many will fritter it away due to the deplorable state of our educational systems.

@scottsantens This should have started the minute we developed tractors, trains and other technologies that increased productivity. But is never too late!

To become ready, we need to institute a Universal Basic Income floor of any size. We should make sure to protect EVERYONE from the downsides of technological displacement, and WE SHOULD ALL BENEFIT from AI-driven productivity growth because WE ALL TRAINED THE AI W/ OUR WORK/DATA.

@DavidHeadPhd At least that is actually YOUR book. I get these all the time extolling the virtues of other people's books.

Oh how I wish this invitation from the HALF ASS BOOK CLUB were real! What an honor it would be....

@jeffkoperski @DDoroshow Editors who know how to manage simple email accounts, like in the good old days, would eliminate the need for these portals.

@DDoroshow Half my kingdom for a solution to this.

What kills me about reviewing manuscripts isn't not having time and doing them for free. It's spending 20 minutes trying to figure out my EditorialManager username and password and resetting them 6 times before I can even enter my review. #academia

@FergHodgson Alberta, Texas, and the states in betwixt should spend their minutes creating a confederation with shared defense, internal free trade and movement, a gold-based dollar, free speech and arms bearing, and everything else left to local discretion.

@coreyhoganyyc Every minute spent on independence is a minute devoted to a glorious future for Alberta. Every minute devoted to remaining under Ottawa is a minute nailing the coffin for Alberta.

As Albertans, every minute spent on separatism is a minute we're 1) dividing families, 2) scaring away investors, and 3) not building our province and our country. nationalnewswatch.com/2026/03/27/alb…

@col_a_buendia More like since March 1933 ...

I hate them for taking the 250th from us. Nobody wants to celebrate, everyone just trying to survive. What should've been great collective joy is mourning by actual Americans and apathy from 100 million strangers. What a shit show we've made of this place since 1776.

@JustPlainSmith So Thanos ... halfinated the universe?

"Decimate" derives from Latin and the Roman practice of killing every tenth man in a military unit that showed cowardice. Strictly, it still means to destroy a tenth of something, but many use it as a synonym for "obliterate." I prefer the stricter usage because of its etymology.

@DanielGullotta Never would have thunk it!

I took the theology quiz and I am pretty happy with the results.

@karpathy Does it ever ask "instead of talking in circles, how about coming up with a testable hypothesis?"

- Drafted a blog post - Used an LLM to meticulously improve the argument over 4 hours. - Wow, feeling great, it’s so convincing! - Fun idea let’s ask it to argue the opposite. - LLM demolishes the entire argument and convinces me that the opposite is in fact true. - lol The LLMs may elicit an opinion when asked but are extremely competent in arguing almost any direction. This is actually super useful as a tool for forming your own opinions, just make sure to ask different directions and be careful with the sycophancy.

@NASorg They are called commissars and they are absolutely essential to ideological purity.

Our trust funds to help the elderly and poor are nearly broke. Why, then, are we providing incentives for schools like Stanford to hire hundreds of unnecessary and expensive administrators?

@Smithdanj See also Niall Ferguson's The War of the World ch. 12 "Through the Looking Glass."

Everyone knows the economic calculation problems in the Soviet Union, but it is clear that Nazi Germany, with its extensive system of price controls, state ownership, labor market interventions, and war directives, had also suppressed market prices to an extent that they ran into economic calculation problems (Tooze’s Wages of Destruction)

@aakashgupta Trivial model!

This is an absolute masterclass from MIT on how to speak

@timand2037 Just use the convoy system. US government to insure the ships and oil from ~Qatar to some point in the Gulf of Oman. Iran to pay environmental cleanup costs for any it sinks, if it loses the war.

The Strait of Hormuz is open. It has been open every day since February 28. The IRGC never closed it but rather converted 21 miles of international waterway into a permissioned gate with a toll booth, a vetting process, and a guest list. Traffic has collapsed 70 to 80 percent. But the handful of tankers that transit each day do so with IRGC clearance, paid in yuan or USDT, at $2 million to $4 million per vessel. The process is now documented. A tanker operator contacts an IRGC-linked intermediary. The operator submits vessel ownership, flag state, cargo manifest, destination, crew list, and AIS transponder data. The IRGC runs background checks: no US-linked ownership, no Israeli cargo, no flagging to aggressor states. If approved, a toll is negotiated. Payment is executed in cash, Chinese yuan, or USDT on the Tron network. The IRGC issues VHF radio clearance with a specific time window and route through Iranian territorial waters near Larak Island, where IRGC Navy performs visual confirmation. The vessel transits. No physical escort is provided. The “protection” is the removal of the interdiction threat. You are safe because the entity that would attack you has decided not to. China passes. India passes. Pakistan, Turkey, Malaysia, Iraq, Bangladesh pass. Shadow fleet operators aligned with Russia pass. Not all pay the full toll. Some receive exemptions through government-to-government arrangements. Some pay reduced rates. Some pay nothing because the geopolitical alignment is payment enough. The system is not a blockade. It is a membership club with a cover charge denominated in currencies that are not the US dollar. And here is what nobody is covering. Lloyd’s of London and the international insurance market have withdrawn standard hull and machinery coverage for Hormuz transits. War-risk policies now carry premiums of up to 5 percent of vessel value, $5 million for a $100 million tanker, per voyage. But the actuarial models that price those premiums now incorporate IRGC vetting status as a risk-reduction variable. If a vessel can prove it has paid the toll and received VHF clearance, the probability of loss drops from above 20 percent to below 5 percent. The same models that price hurricane risk and earthquake exposure are now pricing IRGC compliance as a safety factor. The insurance industry has done something no government intended: it has formalised IRGC authority over the strait in actuarial mathematics. A tanker that pays the toll is insurable. A tanker that does not is stranded. Dozens of vessels sit outside the strait right now, unable to transit because no underwriter will cover them. The insurance withdrawal is not a market reaction. It is a structural enforcement mechanism that makes IRGC permission the prerequisite for commercial shipping. Every toll paid in yuan is a barrel that settled outside the dollar system. Every USDT transaction on Tron is a 3-second settlement bypassing SWIFT and sanctions. Iran’s parliament is drafting legislation to formalise the toll as “security compensation.” If that bill passes, ad-hoc extortion becomes sovereign law, and the precedent for chokepoint monetisation enters the international legal framework. Gold watches from the side. Spot prices muted at $5,000 to $5,400 by dollar strength and rising yields, while central banks in China, Russia, and India quietly accumulate on every dip. The short-term safe-haven has not fired. The long-term de-dollarization trade is loading. The strait is open. The molecules move. But only for those who pay the toll, in the currency the toll booth accepts, after the vetting the toll booth requires. The rest wait. The clocks tick. Saturday arrives.

@GarrettPetersen As several others have hinted, one may want beep boop robots. Our earliest AI models, called domesticated animals, we sometimes made smarter or more affective and sometimes dumber or less affective depending on their purpose. Vide papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

We're watching The Wild Robot. Good movie! But it occurs to me that the "robot" as emotionless shallow-affect beep boop reasoning machine is just a trope now. Not a possible future tech. If we build AI robots in the future, they'll be able to emote as well as Claude can now.